


but i'm still here, i hope you know

by BooyahFordhamYacht



Series: and did you love me like the way you wrote(shyan oneshots) [2]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst without a happy ending, Believing In Ghosts, But It Makes It worse, Car Accidents, Extreme Trigger Warning, I feel so bad, I'm Going to Hell, I've never been so sorry, Lots of Importance About Days, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Much death, Ocean Metaphors, Ocean references, Or Maybe Shane's Crazy, Really not, SO, Suicide, Terrible writing, The Supernatural, Yikes, You Decide, because there's a lot of that, could be, everyone is sad, kind of, okay, okay i am so sorry, please dont read if depression or suicide or extreme grief is triggering for you, trigger warning, um
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 06:25:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13851945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BooyahFordhamYacht/pseuds/BooyahFordhamYacht
Summary: he always wanted to get lost in it. that deep dark sea of believing in something more. he wanted to feel the surge of the waters accepting him, wanted to understand what was so addictive about it. shane never realized the price he’d have to pay to be pulled under the surface into the cold, unforgiving roaring swells of the ocean.AN: so i promised some commenters on for you to be happy and loved that i would write some happy shyan after that heartbreak. This… this is not that. This may actually be worse. Don’t read if you don’t feel like crying.Title from Keaton Henson's amazing song Alright. Go listen to it and cry if you want.





	but i'm still here, i hope you know

Ryan Bergara dies at 7:18pm on the first Thursday of January. 

 

Shane Madej’s phone rings at 11:13pm that same day. It’s Jake, he’s crying and it takes him almost two minutes to get out the words  _ Ryan’s dead _ , and the floor falls out from underneath Shane when he finally hears them. There are more words, words like  _ drunk driver  _ and  _ dead on impact  _ and  _ no pain _ , and Shane for a moment thinks it’s funny that Jake’s saying there was no pain, because all Shane can feel is pain.

 

He doesn’t move from the couch for the first two days. Sara puts glasses of water in his hand and he drinks them, and she hands him small bites of food and he eats those if he can. Most of the time he can’t.

 

Sunday is the service. Sara puts him in a suit and he sits in between Ryan’s mum and Helen, and more people say they’re sorry to Shane than they do to Helen. He’d wonder why if he didn’t already know. And maybe they’d never been great at hiding that, but Shane’s too empty to care.

 

The casket is shut and Shane hates knowing why, hates picturing why, and they have this dumb photo of Ryan on the casket, smiling straight into the camera and Shane can’t help hating it because yeah, Ryan smiled all the time but Shane has -  _ no, had _ such a hard time getting him to actually look into the fucking lens long enough to take a good photo of him. He always got distracted by the way Shane was holding the camera or the way Shane had to squat a little bit to get a good angle on the shorter man. Ryan always ended up bursting into laughter, and if maybe Shane kept all of those pictures of Ryan laughing, well, that wasn’t anyone’s business but his. And Ryan’s. But not really Ryan’s, not anymore.

 

Sara drives him back to their apartment and doesn’t say a word, and Shane can’t help being grateful that she doesn’t say anything. He knows she knows what Ryan was to Shane, and he knows probably that hurts, but he can’t pull himself above the rising tide long enough to help her swim too. 

 

Three days later and Shane hasn’t spoken a word since they left the funeral. He’s gotten texts and tweets from family, friends and fans who know he can’t possibly be okay, and they’re right, he isn’t. He doesn’t respond to any of them. Finn calls six times and Shane doesn’t pick up once, and finally Sara calls Finn to tell him that  _ I’m looking after Shane  _ and  _ yes I’ll call if he needs you  _ and  _ I’m doing okay, I think, just worried about Shane _ . 

 

The second Thursday in January and there’s a knock on the door. Sara’s not at home and so Shane pulls himself onto shaky, weak legs, feels the dizzying rush, knows probably he’s terribly dehydrated despite Sara’s best efforts. Making it to the door is in itself a miracle. 

 

TJ is standing there when Shane remembers how to open it, and he looks just as terrible as he did at the funeral when Shane saw him and they didn’t speak. There are dark bags under his red, puffy eyes, and Shane briefly realizes he must look much worse. TJ has a box in his hands, and when he hands it to Shane, Shane recognizes all of Ryan’s ghosthunting gear, Ryan’s favorite mug(it has a Gene cartoon on it), the faceswap photo that had hung between their desks, and some other bits and pieces. 

 

TJ scratches the back of his neck with his newly empty hand. “I, uh, bought the gear off Buzzfeed, since technically it was theirs. I know you don’t really believe in ghosts, but I thought maybe-”

 

Shane cuts him off with a voice weak from tears and misuse. “I believed in him.” And they both know that’s the biggest thank you Shane could give him. TJ nods once and disappears, or maybe Shane shuts his eyes for longer than the span of one blink. He’s not quite sure which. 

 

It takes Shane until the third Wednesday in January to touch more than that dumb faceswap photo. It’s three am, pitch black and Sara is staying at Helen’s for the time being, as she’s been having nightmares. He picks up one of the motion lights, turns it on, and sets it down on the other side of the living room from the couch. He sits carefully on the couch, legs crossed under him and elbows on his knees, chin in his hands as he focuses on the light. 

 

Shane can remember a million times he’d been watching these lights. With Ryan. Ryan, who had been all chocolate eyes and sunny smiles. Ryan, who hoped so desperately every time that the light would flicker on, that the truth would come out. Shane never believed much in the lights. Shane had never believed in ghosts. He wanted to believe in it, wanted to feel that warmth that Ryan seemed to radiate just from believing in something bigger than himself.

 

Ryan infused Shane with warmth too, but it always left when he did, and Shane hadn’t felt it in weeks. 

 

Sara finds him toppled to the side, fast asleep on the couch, only partially unfolded from the cross-legged position he’d kept watch in. She notices the motion light when her walking by it turns it on, curses softly under her breath but leaves it where it is. 

 

When Shane wakes, Sara is gone to work and there is a glass of water and a cold plate of eggs by the couch. He drinks the water and takes a few bites of the eggs, but they taste like nothing and he stops quickly. 

 

He flops backwards into his previous slump on the couch. Sara won’t be back until at least 5:30, and it’s hardly 10am now. He falls asleep again sometime around 11. He wakes to falling off the couch and slamming into the floor, knocking over the box of Ryan’s things.

 

The spirit box clatters across the floor and stops when it hits the throw rug. Shane stares at it for a minute, thinking, and then when the idea hits him, he immediately breaks into tears. He can’t… he can’t do that. He can’t do that because it would mean accepting that Ryan was really gone. He can’t. 

 

He can’t.

 

Shane stares at the spirit box until Sara comes home. When she sees the spilled box, she goes to pick everything up, and stops when Shane snaps his head to her. She understands. She knows what she is, or maybe was, to Shane, but she always knew that Ryan was so much more, and she’d never really questioned what that would mean for her and Shane someday. Her heart hurts for Shane, knowing that he and Ryan never got the chance to figure that out for themselves. And so it makes sense that Shane doesn’t want anything touching Ryan’s things except for Shane himself. To keep Ryan safe. To keep Ryan where Shane can still have him, and the very thought of that breaks Sara’s heart, but there’s nothing she can do for Shane. Not yet. 

 

Knowing that Shane probably hasn’t eaten anything except the miniscule amount of eggs that are gone from the plate, she clears the old plate and heads into the kitchen to make dinner, leaving Shane alone with Ryan’s things.

 

Shane doesn’t move. Shane stares at the spirit box, his mind tossing with all the possibilities. 

 

What he could do. What he should do. And  _ no,  _ Shane can’t. He just. No.

 

Because it wouldn’t work. Because it’s a stupid idea. And because that would mean that Ryan was- Shane  _ can’t _ . 

 

Shane doesn’t eat dinner. Well, he eats enough that he knows Sara will feel comfortable leaving him alone to go look after Helen. The chicken is probably wonderful, Sara’s a good cook, but it tastes bland to Shane. Everything tastes bland to Shane. 

 

And shortly after, Shane is alone again. 

 

He doesn’t look at the spirit box. He changes the batteries on the motion light and sets it back down. While Shane waits for the light to flicker on(it will, it will, it will), he searches through the things TJ brought him. These items made up everything that stayed on Ryan’s desk, and the ghost hunting gear(although that was more often than not in a box  _ underneath  _ Ryan’s desk). 

 

The mug that Shane gave him is on top. Shane remembers it well. He’d had it specially made for Ryan’s 26th birthday, among other gifts. It’s white, with a little Gene cartoon that says  _ Gggggoooooo get ‘em!  _ and Shane can picture Ryan laughing as he noticed the extremely strange spelling of  _ go _ , and Shane can picture Ryan laughing even harder as Shane explained that it was spelled that way to be precise about the way that Gene would say it. Ryan calls it stupid and uses it three times a week for the rest of the year. 

 

The faceswap photo makes Shane smile, only slightly. He can remember Ryan so clearly, trying to convince Shane to take the dumb photo with him. ( _ “Please, Shane, it’ll be so funny!” “Ryan, it’s absolutely ridiculous! And why do you want to take another photo? We have like millions of photos together!” “Cmon, big guy, you know you could never get sick of seeing my gorgeous mug.”) _ Shane ended up thinking the photo was so hilarious that he posted it on Instagram, and, when Ryan insisted, hung it on the post between their desks. Eugene, of course, made fun of them because  _ if you two weren’t already basically the same person, now you have to go and make it official _ . 

 

Ryan’s  _ Buzzfeed Unsolved  _ baseball hat is next, and it still smells like Ryan, only this time the smell of Ryan doesn’t make Shane smile, doesn’t make him feel warm and relaxed. It makes him feel cold and aching, like someone ripped him into pieces and put him back together with a needle made of ice. Shane can still feel the rain of a cold March day, filming in Pennsylvania, and the clouds had opened up on them. Ryan had only had a long-sleeved tee and the hat to protect him from the downpour, and so Shane had taken off his jacket and created a makeshift umbrella for himself, Ryan, and the cameras and mics strapped to their chest. With nowhere to find shelter until TJ showed up with the key to the location they were investigating, Shane and Ryan stood together in the rain and laughed about nothing until the drops of water weren’t alone on their faces. 

 

Shane sucks in a breath when he sees one of his own sweatshirts twisted in the ghost hunting gear. He remembers this sweatshirt. It’s one of those cheesy Nike sweatshirts that had been a birthday gift, the type of gift that you wore occasionally because it was comfortable but would hardly notice if someday it wasn’t there anymore. He thinks he remembers giving this one to Ryan - a particularly “cold” day in LA that had been too much for the native Californian(it was 56 degrees out and Ryan was just lucky that Shane actually still owned anything resembling warm clothing, let alone having one at the office). Shane had always found it strange that he never saw it again, but he’d noticed something that looked like it in a 3am FaceTime call to a sick Ryan. Maybe it had been in more use then Shane had realized. 

 

The idea that maybe Shane had meant something greater to Ryan than he’d realized was painful and somehow also the most soothing thought he’d had since Jake had called him. 

 

A twisted piece of paper is curled in the bottom of the box beneath the rest of Ryan’s things, and something compels Shane to tug it out from the rest. Unfurling it reveals a pencil drawing of a shaggy-haired man in glasses, and Shane nearly falls off the couch when he realizes it’s a drawing of him. Of  _ Shane _ . And he’d known that Ryan could draw but he never knew that he could draw like _ this _ . Shane hurts. 

 

And then Shane makes the mistake of flipping the paper over and catching a glimpse of a caption for the drawing, written clearly in Ryan’s handwriting. 

 

_ Shane - the only rope keeping me from sailing away.  _

 

It’s nothing, absolutely nothing, and at the same time it’s everything. It doesn’t mean anything because Ryan is gone and Ryan is never coming back but then Shane thinks about how Ryan called him the  _ only  _ thing that kept Ryan here and Shane doesn’t know exactly what Ryan means by that, if he means that Shane was the only thing that kept him at Buzzfeed or in Los Angeles or if maybe Shane was the only thing tying him down, keeping him from reaching his true potential, and then Shane thinks maybe Ryan meant that Shane was the only thing keeping him  _ alive  _ and that hurts more than anything else he’s found in the box today. If that’s what Ryan meant, then that means Shane failed him in more ways than he’d known. Because yes, he failed Ryan, he failed to tell him the truth and he failed to tell Ryan that he loved him but he had  _ never  _ thought that he would fail Ryan badly enough to let Ryan die. 

 

Shane doesn’t want to think that Ryan, that the Ryan who had been absolutely fucking  _ everything  _ to Shane, that that Ryan could be gone because of him. Because of Shane. He doesn’t want to think that. Hell, Shane doesn’t want to  _ think _ . 

 

Shane falls asleep that night with the sweatshirt on and the drawing clutched to his chest. 

 

The next two or so weeks pass by in a miserable blur. Shane eats enough to survive, tries to drink enough water to keep the headaches at bay, and sleeps most of the day. Sara has adapted to the schedule, and believes that Shane is grieving by himself well enough that she tries to leave him alone as much as she can. Jake comes out and spends a couple more days with him(Jake and his family had driven up for the funeral, but he’d left shortly after with a promise to return soon). Jake has ever-present dark bags underneath his eyes and is a cold shell of the happy, bright kid that Shane had known for nearly six years. 

 

But Jake leaves eventually, leaves with a gentle “you know Ryan loved you, right?” and Shane makes a quiet noise because, yes, he’s starting to realize that Ryan had loved him more than Shane could have ever imagined. Jake hugs him and Shane tries to hug back. He says goodbye to Sara and then Jake is gone, and it hurts because Jake acts just like his big brother used to, and the one time he smiles it’s that same unbelievably bright grin that Ryan used to smile at Shane.

 

It reminds Shane of the sleepy smile he could get Ryan to give him if he cracked some super corny joke at six am as they packed their things up in the silence of a vacant “haunted” house. 

 

It reminds Shane of the white of Ryan’s teeth at two am when it was dark and that was all he could see, when Ryan was scared and they were twisted in sleeping bags. 

 

It reminds Shane of the wheeze and the cackling giggle that would follow when they were on set and Shae said something particularly ridiculous, which most of the time he did. 

 

It reminds Shane of the soft, gentle smile that Ryan gives him every night in Shane’s dreams, where Ryan comes back and smiles at Shane and tells him  _ of course I’d never leave you, big guy _ .

 

But that smile never really happens and Jake leaves and suddenly Shane is all alone again, hurting.

 

The last day in January falls on a Wednesday and as the dawn pushes sunlight through the curtains, Shane is struggling. Really, really struggling. Worse than he had been the whole time. Ryan is gone. Ryan is gone and Shane is cold and alone. Ryan died, and Shane is still here and that just doesn’t feel right to Shane. It feels like Shane has been cut to pieces, and only a little bit of him is left, because Ryan wasn’t even Shane’s other half. Ryan was Shane’s everything. And Ryan is gone.

 

Sara doesn’t even come home in the mornings anymore. Shane’s getting up and getting his own food and water, and she approves, usually, of how much he’s eating, and their boss at Buzzfeed has been  _ so  _ kind about letting Shane stay home, mostly because she knew how close Ryan and Shane were, and really there isn’t a whole ton of work for Shane to do until the higher-ups decide what to do about Unsolved. 

 

So Shane is alone most of the time, and that’s good enough. Because the motion light turns on every night now, and Shane thinks maybe he isn’t as alone as he feels. 

 

He’s ready.

 

He waits until Sara comes back from work, cooks dinner, chats aimlessly about her day(Shane thinks Sara likes to believe that all the talking fills the void in Shane, and it doesn’t, but it seems to bring her some peace and so he never says a word), and then does the dishes and leaves Shane with a cup of tea and a glass of water, and a promise to be by in the morning tomorrow, because he seems worse than yesterday and Sara’s getting antsy about leaving him alone so much. 

 

He waits until the dying orange sun has faded to a dark blue of night, and then he picks up the spirit box, lays on his belly on the floor, head resting on his cheek, facing the box. He turns it on and doesn’t even flinch when the loud static fills his ears and nose and lungs and throat and consumes him. 

 

Shane shuts his eyes as tears leak out, and whispers into the box. “Ryan?” the static crackles louder for a moment and then nothing. 

 

He huffs out a half-laugh, forces himself to crack a joke that just might do the trick. “Hey, you asshole, if you don’t prove it right now, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life telling everyone ghosts aren’t real.” 

 

Nothing. For a long minute, only the crackling of the box keeps Shane company. And then Shane hears it. He knows. It’s fleeting, a single word that Shane knows deep in his heart is Ryan. 

 

A single, crackled whisper “ _ Shane _ ” and all of a sudden Shane is crying, streams of tears down his face, too elated and sad and happy and broken to wipe them away. 

 

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m here, little guy.”

 

No response to that one and Shane doesn’t care because now he’s sure, and when the next whisper comes through the box Shane has no questions about what he should do. He knows he’ll give Ryan what he wants.

 

When Sara comes back the next day, she’s surprised because Shane seems  _ good _ . He smiles a little and helps her with the dishes after breakfast and even tells her to have a good day at work, and to give Helen a hug for him. He’s so good that she tells him she’s not coming back that night, that Helen wanted to go to Ryan’s grave and needed Sara to go with her. Shane doesn’t even seem fazed and maybe that should worry Sara but she’s just so happy to see some life back in him, some semblance of the Shane Sara used to know.

 

Again, Shane waits until the sun starts. The drive used to feel short, but now it drags by. The sun hangs low and orange against the horizon as Shane finally pulls into a sandy parking spot. Even in Los Angeles, he’s the only one here tonight.

 

Ryan’s drawing of him crinkles in the pocket of the sweatshirt, and when he gets to the edge, the water laps at his sneakers. It’s not freezing, but as it soaks his socks Shane knows he should at least feel a little cold. He doesn’t. He doesn’t feel anything.

 

As he walks in, the water reaching his knees and then his waist, Shane thinks about what Ryan had whispered last night.  _ Come to me _ , said the spirit box, and Shane had known what he had to do. And now here he was. 

 

Shane Madej disappears under the surface of the ocean at 7:18pm on the first Thursday of February.

**Author's Note:**

> I'M SO SORRY
> 
> On a slightly better note, I'm going to start taking requests/prompts, both for Shane x Ryan and something else... Zach x Eugene!! That's right, ya girl is official Buzzfeed trash. I hope this didn't totally kill you. I'm officially on spring break, so even without requests or prompts I will hopefully be posting some Shyan and Zagene content, and you might even get to see me write something not totally depressing. Leave your prompts/requests in the comments or message me, or come find me on twitter (unsolvedmaggie), even if you just want to yell at me or cry about Shane Madej together.
> 
> Lastly, all of my titles for Shyan thus far(and probably from here on out) are from Keaton Henson's incredible songs. If you really want to go feel some feels, go listen to that wonderful man. A couple of my personal favorites are Polyhymnia, Oliver Dalston Browning, Nests, and You Don't Know How Lucky You Are.


End file.
